


Chorós (the Goat Trilogy)

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Series: Qui Habitat [3]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alien Invasion, Alternate Universe, Apocalypse, Ori (Stargate), the world's going to hell and all I can do is watch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:20:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27715343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: The Ori attack on the Milky Way looks different in Pegasus, even more so if you aren't in a position of power and can only watch from the side of the stage.Nancy Clayton and the end of her world.
Series: Qui Habitat [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/12226
Comments: 20
Kudos: 42





	Chorós (the Goat Trilogy)

**Author's Note:**

> The Goat Trilogy is three stories that cover the same time period within the universe, which is just before the events of the main story. They can be read in any order; they are listed in the order they were written. 
> 
> In the meta sense, they were written for different purposes. Art is Long (2009) was written contemporaneously with the early parts of the main story to fill out the universe because the main story began with Earth already having fallen; Rodney is an SGC veteran and a civilian and a sharp observer. In Medias Res (2019) was written after I returned to the story after most of a decade away and was part of the big edit to make everything fit more seamlessly; John is forced to become the leader and commander Jack O'Neill bet the farm he could be, but in a capacity nobody ever imagined. Choros (2020) is to shift perspective away from Atlantis's most powerful and toward those with less information or perspective; Nancy's journey is more reactive rather than proactive, but she also finds reasons to hope and persevere perhaps because she doesn't have to live with the weight of responsibility.
> 
> And the goat... the goat comes from the Greek origins of the word "tragedy." The series has a theme of hope and the triumph over darkness, but these three stories are about the fall.

The first time the Ori come up during a Medical Division meeting, Nancy isn't the only one to sigh. It's not that they aren't all curious about the new Big Bad back in their home galaxy, it's that they were (a) talking about something else entirely at the time and (b) already fifteen minutes over and hungry because Carson intentionally schedules department meetings right before lunch precisely so that they don't run over. 

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it," is what Carson says. "Right now, they aren't impacting our resources or our mandate. If they prove more troublesome down the road, we'll make adjustments based on actual conditions and not speculation. Let's worry about the problems closer to us, yeah?" 

And then he gets up and pats his stomach and asks if there are any more questions and that's the end of the meeting. 

Nancy doesn't think about the Ori again for another few weeks, if that. She's got an article running through the meat grinder of in-house peer review, she's got two MEDCAPs scheduled, and Lori finally got her Nintendo fixed and so they have a whole lot of Mario Kart to catch up on. It's life as usual in Atlantis, which is never very usual at all, so her clinic shifts include marines with Ancient construction dust inhalation (something collapsed in E-3, whether they were the cause or just proximate to the effect is Colonel Sheppard's problem to solve), The Chemists Did Something Again, and a surprising number of requests for breast exams that has her asking Carson just what kind of super-scary cancer warnings the SGC sent them to distribute. Which turns out to be honestly not much of anything, just that this is the first time the SGC has ever sent Atlantis anything on breast cancer and so they can probably blame the newly-installed Carolyn Lam anyway. 

"Maybe we'll get our second GYN now," Lori says. "I know being out here means doing clinical work not in our area of specialization, but Osterman's booked until Thanksgiving and that's not even counting the ones who don't want to go to a guy. I'm a maxillofacial surgeon and this is antipodean as far as I go."

Kevin's a sweet guy and so thoroughly professional that Nancy doesn't even mind that much that one of her co-workers gets a regularly-scheduled view of her vagina for non-recreational purposes. But the SGC should have sent them a woman if they were only going to send one and they really shouldn't have sent one; the demographics of Atlantis are heavily skewed male because of Little Tripoli, but the civilian imbalance isn't so uneven. Kevin doesn't do regular clinic shifts as a result of his workload and everyone else gets some of the overflow, especially the lady docs. 

Nancy means to ask Yoni about it but forgets because they spent the entire time going over her article trying to come up with a way of ignoring Metzinger's criticisms that she doesn't address tetany despite the article having zero to do with hypoparathyroidism. "This car is not a zebra," is how Yoni summarizes Bill's problem with her work. They agree that the path of least resistance is to just throw in a useless footnote about tetany that nobody but Bill will read, but they also wargame out a more involved remedy that hopefully she won't have to implement because _it's totally irrelevant_. 

The Ori share that irrelevance, more or less, turning up as part of the This Week at the SGC news digest from the Mountain, present and annoying and still nothing that affects anything in Atlantis - at least what the normal people in Atlantis see. If Carson and Yoni are spending more time during business hours in serious discussion, there are lots of possible reasons that don't involve Volnik or the Ori. 

Eventually, though, the Ori graduate from the 'by the way' section of the This Week at the SGC news digest to the main body. They have reached the point where they are getting resources redirected, which Nancy knows from her limited experiences is a significant threshold. Atlantis isn't greatly affected yet, although this is only something she can gauge by what isn't getting taken away. What Atlantis was supposed to have gotten and now won't is something else and she can maybe sorta start to see the shape of what should have been in the way things are. They don't get a second GYN, which was half a pipe dream, but they also don't get the two NPs who were supposed to be on the _Odyssey_ , which is already three weeks late leaving Earth. 

"There are significant start-up costs in fighting a new enemy," Yoni tells everyone during a department meeting. He has to be up front because he's the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, but he usually sits off to the side and lets Carson take center stage by himself. His contributions thus tend to be asides or occasionally threats to back up Carson's more polite requests to do things they don't want to do. Except now, when he's the focus of attention because the Ori invasion has finally impacted Atlantis and everyone in the unit knows that Yoni had more combat experience than the rest of them put together before he joined Major Lorne's offworld team. He has gone to war in both galaxies and that makes him the voice of experience - and reason - here in Medical as much as for the fact that he's been with the program for longer than almost all of them. 

The latest databurst is full of projects that they will now have to prioritize, some of which are inherited and some which will need to be designed out of whole cloth. But the end result is the same: they will have to be subordinate to the SGC's wishes and needs in a way they have never been and it chafes all of them because they are not out here in Pegasus to be the junior varsity. Carson tried to convince them otherwise, but Yoni stepped in when that failed. 

"It's like fighting any new disease," Yoni says, sitting forward in his chair with his elbows on his knees instead of his usual leaning back at a gravity-imperiled angle. "You have to retrofit your existing equipment for testing and treatment, you have to sink resources into new R&D, you keep getting misled by early indicators that don't indicate anything past a certain point. This is what the SGC is doing. 

"Remember what gets shoved aside during a disease outbreak or a bad flu season: cancer treatments, organ transplants, all kinds of serious work that just isn't the crisis du jour. That doesn't make it less crucial, certainly not to anyone who needs chemo or a quadruple bypass or a new kidney. What we're accepting are projects too important to shelve and that we are suited to handle. The Ori and their plague are a problem, but don't think for a moment that we're either taking the Mountain's scutwork or we're taking things because we don't want to say no."

For better or worse, the assurance that they're not doing something to be nice comes across a lot more sincerely from Yoni than it would from Carson. Nancy knows that the two men know that as well. 

The pretense that they are merely not the Level 1 Trauma Center in this crisis holds until the middle of the summer, when the Ori build something called a Supergate and start flooding the Milky Way with troops and ships and weapons and priors. She imagines it as a kind of hellmouth, but instead of rats and roaches or demons or whatever crawls out of hellmouths (or sewers), it's armies of religious warriors intent on killing everyone who doesn't convert to their gods. 

There is an earnestly serious fight about whether to refer to the Ori in terms of Islamism or the Crusades and whether it's bigoted to do so, mostly involving G-2. Who are also in charge of Atlantis's internal news organs, so it really involves all of them. She works out in Little Tripoli along with most of the other civilians who train in the martial arts or otherwise do more vigorous physical activities than yoga or spin class, so she gets it from all sides because the Marines are uniformly referring to it in terms of their own experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and not what happened there a millennium before that. Her personal opinion is that the name on the tin doesn't particularly matter if the choice is the same - submit or die - and so tomato, tomahto as long as the Ori are defeated. 

It's just that it's not terribly clear that that's what's going to happen. The Ori are _all over_ the Milky Way, taking down planet after planet. The databurst news from the SGC is unremittingly awful if you pay attention to it (not everyone does) and it's harder to look at that and then catch up on a week's worth of the _New York Times_ reporting from their perch of blissful ignorance. 

"The SGC's history is very, very full of very, very close calls," Yoni tells her when they go to dinner one night after she tags along with Major Lorne's team on a mission. Suarez and Ortilla join them - it's still a little weird without Reletti - plus Mike Abelard finds them on line at the commissary and Lorne turns up with Branson and Ishigawa from Life Sciences in tow by the time they hit the salad bar, so they take one of the big tables. "Before Atlantis, almost everyone they recruited was in direct response to some disaster that was inevitably averted at the last possible minute." 

"What was yours, Doc?" Suarez asks. 

"SG-1 came into contact with a virus that turned people into cavemen," Yoni replies with a grin. "The Geico commercial was wrong, by the way." 

That story definitely requires explanation and Yoni is more willing to reminisce than eat the near-deer stew that only appears when one of Weapons Company's platoons have KP duty. Mike Hanzis is a nice guy under the growly façade, but what he has against the rest of Atlantis that this stew is not banned she doesn't know. 

Lorne gets needled into sharing some of his near misses - unlike Yoni, Lorne was on the front lines and saw a lot more up close - and the end result is that Nancy isn't less afraid of the Ori because of what they are, but she's maybe a little more open to the idea that the SGC can pull it off in the end if only by accident. It makes her consider all of the crises here in Atlantis and how they're all still here despite everything (that they usually only hear about after the fact) and maybe there's a lesson in that. 

In the early fall, the SGC news portion of the databurst that gets released to the general population of Atlantis goes from 'digest' to 'executive summary,' skipping over a lot of details in favor of a neater and more anodyne overview of what is happening in the Milky Way. She doesn't know if it's the SGC's decision or Doctor Weir's to shield them from the worst. It's above her pay grade as the marines like to say. 

She thinks about this the week before Halloween, when Carson announces out of the blue late one morning that there will be a department meeting at noon. 

"It's databurst day," Roberta says as they stand in the lab section's break room, ostensibly to get coffee or tea but mostly to quiz each other on what they've heard because this is definitely a bad news thing. "Something from home." 

"Both Colonel Sheppard's team and Major Lorne's team are offworld," Metzinger offers as a counterpoint. "Something might have happened." 

"Something always happens," Biro retorts. "It usually doesn't even merit an email anymore except to whoever's got to cover Yoni's clinic shift." 

Which is true enough. 

The leading candidate for the bad news from home is that some of them are getting sent back to Earth. Everyone knows that the SGC has been demanding a ton of personnel from both Science and Medical, anyone who might possibly be of use in the fight against the Ori. Which seems like a reasonable request, or at least a request that shouldn't be denied because the galaxy is in peril, but then you realize that they want McKay and they want Yoni and they want half of Engineering and they won't give them back once this crisis is over. And everyone believes it _will_ be over at some point, that the Ori will be defeated if at no small cost. At a great cost already, one that the SGC is actively protecting them from dwelling on, but there is still a certainty to the knowledge that the good guys will win in the end. So if today's databurst contains demands that people who are essential here have to go back to Earth, then they are only doing what they've been told to do by looking down the road at the future point where they are going to have to fight to get those people back. 

(Nancy does not think she is going anywhere; she's an endocrinologist and she was recruited into the program to look at Wraith enzyme and that's what she's still doing. She picked up a small thing from Biro, who _has_ been re-tasked to an Ori-facing project, but it's more the academic equivalent of keeping a houseplant watered and while she'll take the co-author credit at the end she's not doing much heavy lifting right now. Biro, on the other hand, is looking a little fretful that she might be told to pack her bags.) 

Yoni and Carson turn up together and the room explodes with questions that Carson refuses to answer, telling everyone to wait because Doctor Weir will be addressing everyone. If Yoni knows that he's being sent back to Earth, he isn't showing anything. But he's also not making eye contact with her, either. 

The news Weir gives them is... numbing. Nancy can't even conceive of the scale of devastation. _Twenty million people dead in a day_. It's too large a number. It rattles around in her head and she thinks about that Stalin quote about the death of one being a tragedy, but the death of millions being a statistic and... she doesn't want it to be a statistic. But she still can't count that high in a meaningful way. She's been to both Beijing and Dhaka but can't imagine what kind of devastation would be required to kill so many people except as a set piece in some kind of superhero action movie and that seems profane in the moment. So she sits there not thinking at all instead, just letting everyone else's reactions wash over her. 

There's nobody in the unit from Beijing or Dhaka; the closest they get is Chung, whose family is originally from Guangzhou, and Roberta, who was born in Hong Kong. But this isn't the kind of tragedy that rests on national identity and the first thing that emerges from the shock of the news is profound sadness. 

The rest of the day is theirs to do what they feel they need to, Carson tells them afterward. They can go to one of the religious services or go home or go back to work if that's what they want. "Your grief is real and enormous, so please treat it with the respect it deserves and treat yourselves gently and with love. This will not be over tomorrow but that's when we must rejoin the fight, so don't drink too much tonight and be kind to each other in the morning."

Nancy isn't sure what she wants to do any more than she's sure what she wants to think. But going back to her lab is probably not it. 

Next to her, Lori is sitting there with her hand over her mouth and staring into space. Lori's been to Bangladesh a dozen times for humanitarian missions, sewing up cleft palates and other operations. 

"Hey," she says quietly, then again louder because the room's gotten noisy as Carson is being peppered with questions at the front of the room. "You want to get out of here?" 

It takes Lori a second to nod and then an extra beat to get up from her chair and then remember her bag is still on the floor. While Lori collects herself and her things, Nancy watches as Yoni, trailing his own comet's worth of questioners, pushes through to Carson so they can face the barrage together. 

She had no plan beyond getting out of the lecture hall they use for department meetings, so once they are in the hallway, she pauses to see if Lori has any idea of what she wants to do. 

"I don't think I want to eat," Lori says when asked. "But I don't know what I don't not want to do." 

They end up in the south pier park, as do enough other people that it feels kind of crowded despite it being bigger than Central Park in New York. Will the Ori bomb New York next? Why did they pick Beijing and Dhaka to start with? They aren't the biggest cities on Earth or the most important for the economy or global governance or the Stargate Program or whatever. She has no way of knowing the answer, not only because the SGC didn't provide an explanation but also because she doesn't know enough about either the Ori or the rest of the Milky Way. All she can do is guess from very few actual facts and even less understanding. It's frustrating and scary to know so little and a little humbling and maybe a little embarrassing. It makes her feel a little helpless - and a little gullible for taking the IOA at its word and trusting that Earth has been safe for a decade and no enemy had been so much trouble as to force them to acknowledge the existence of aliens. 

Well, they have to now. 

It feels a little like 9/11, when she was on campus and wound up hanging out with other faculty from departments she never interacted with and absorbed the realization that America was not impervious to attack. Everyone out in the pier park has the same kind of stunned bonhomie, offering thin smiles and whatever booze or drugs they have to hand. (There's not much in the way of hard drugs in Atlantis, but if you want marijuana you can get it.) Everyone's fragile and cut open like a vivisection, wondering what will happen and what they can do and what they should do. It's both extremely relatable and also kinda hard to be around and she wants to be somewhere else, but Lori's finding comfort in all this and so Nancy waits until she's actually hungry before suggesting they go. 

The commissary's staffed by angry, sullen marines who are almost visibly vibrating in place as they ladle out soup and lasagna. The civilians want to help in the fight but don't know how; the marines know how but can't. She wants to apologize to the sergeant who portions out her salad and make sure she gets an extra tomato. 

They wind up playing Zelda in Lori's apartment until late at night and Nancy has never regretted her losing streak in the pet lottery as much as she does tonight when she goes home to an empty apartment. She wants to call her parents, her sister, the friends she left back on Earth who are no doubt feeling the exact same way she does except a couple of days further along. She doesn't want to be alone, but she also doesn't want to be strong for Lori anymore today. And while she could bother Yoni, that's kind of exactly what it would feel like - she knows he's probably been stuck in command staff meetings since their own department one and she doesn't want to be a burden to him, but... but she wants comfort, even the kind of sharp-edged kind that Yoni provides when he thinks you're being a little silly but is willing to humor you. 

She sends him a text. Fifteen minutes later, he sends back a picture of a glass of whisky balanced on one knee. He's at his limit, too. 

Everyone's still kind of foggy the next morning, but they have to work and more importantly they need to work. Carson sends out an email that's both very supportive and kind and also warning them that they are going to have to accept more changes to their workloads as research priorities shift toward fighting the Ori. The goal remains keeping everyone who wants to stay in Atlantis in Atlantis, he tells them, but part of that will require them to take on more work from the Mountain. 

The gyms in Little Tripoli are closed to civilians for the better part of two weeks, officially for what's called a training evolution but is really for safety reasons. Nancy would resent having to use the yoga studios to practice judo and not having her usual selection of partners, but the clinic is being overrun with injuries and it's not hard to guess that the marines are taking out their frustration on each other. The stitches and splints are fast and furious for the first few days, then suddenly drop off to a degree that mystifies some of the doctors but Nancy figures is the platoon sergeants cracking down. She still has to wait for another week before she can go back to throwing Sergeant Kwan across the room. 

She spends an afternoon with Roberta and Yoni and Feinberg as they work out ways to shift pretty much all of Yoni's ongoing work to other people because there's no point in pretending he is going to be working on anything but Prior Plague for the time being. Yoni's mothballed everything that he can, everything that really needs an epidemiologist and doesn't have to be completed this year, but that still leaves enough. He suggests they find a sociologist from G-2 to consult with and offers a couple of names because none of them do anywhere near the level of fieldwork he does. Feinberg's the junior geneticist who was brought in to make up the work Carson lost to administrativa, Roberta's a pathologist who can fake a few other disciplines well enough, and Nancy jokes that she's only around because she can read Yoni's handwriting but they both know that the overlap in their work is enough to count and they consult each other all the time. It's a productive meeting, actually really productive, but she leaves it out of sorts because it feels like she's preparing to lose Yoni, too. 

They don't lose Yoni, partially because there's nowhere for him to go right now. They're not opening a wormhole to Earth for anything short of an emergency evacuation and neither _Daedalus_ nor _Odyssey_ are showing up any time soon to drag anyone away. Even the people in Science who want bereavement leave to go back to China or Bangladesh to mourn their family cannot. But for those who have no personal connection to the tragedy, the transit hold sometimes feels like a blessing and sometimes it feels like they are trapped on the other side of the looking glass. 

As the weeks go by, however, with no change in the status quo life begins to almost kinda return to normal. The shock fades even with the updates from Earth that revise body counts; it feels wrong to say that they get over it, but maybe they get used to it instead. Or maybe they get distracted by the fact that everyone on Earth knows that there are aliens now; reading the news from Earth would be a comedy now if it weren't because of a tragedy. The tin-hatted lunatic fringe is now on CNN because if there are Ori in spaceships, then maybe everything else is true, too. 

The IOA sends Atlantis constantly updated guidelines on what they can and cannot say to anyone not read into the Stargate Program and they are reminded that there are censors even for emails. (They agreed to this when they signed up.) The short version of the guidance is that they are not allowed to mention Pegasus or Atlantis in any context whatsoever; they are allowed to confirm that they work for the SGC but not speak in any specifics about their work. Which is kind of dopey, Nancy thinks. She understands the part about keeping "I work in another galaxy" quiet - the SGC is worried about the connection between the Ori and the Ancients and Atlantis - but who are they fooling when it comes to their research? All of them were established scientists when they were recruited and the IOA has expected them to continue grinding out articles, some for actual for-the-public consumption. All of them answer questions about their (unclassified) research all of the time, but now they are supposed to be silent? The IOA had their hand forced by the Ori, but they are still acting like they can put this genie back in a bottle once it's over. It's frustrating. 

(Her parents initially don't ask her if she's doing alien research. She hasn't been able to usefully explain to them how she spends her professional time for far longer than she's lived with an NDA and then she couldn't even talk about where she was and so they've learned not to ask about work at all. Instead, her mother asks her about boyfriends, which is a guaranteed way to wind up talking to her father about college football. Eventually, though, her father asks if she's met General O'Neill because he seems like he has a good head on his shoulders and she says they shared an elevator once and everyone loves him. From then it's a lot of questions she still can't answer, either because of her clearance or because she just doesn't know. She's still an endocrinologist in Pegasus and this is still a military operation in the Milky Way. She can't tell them that she's safe and she's afraid to tell them that they are. So instead she tells them that their long nightmare is over and she's had to stop dying her hair funny colors and so they kinda have something to thank the Ori for.) 

"Avoid the Crawl Lunch at 1300?" Abelard asks one morning via the chat system. "New month, new marines, new hummus!" 

Nancy belatedly remembers that today is Tuesday. The Crawl - the server slowdown that happens every week once the databurst from Earth is released and everyone in Atlantis checks their email at once - has gotten understandably worse since Beijing and Dhaka. Some people have the willpower to simply wait it out, but she does not and going to lunch is a more productive use of her time than staring at her taskbar waiting for the email icon to change. 

"Who's on KP now?" Lori asks. "Macaroni marines? Cookie marines? Salad marines?"

Most civilians do not know the actual unit designations of the marines in Atlantis because every unit seems to have multiple names. Depending on the context marines in the collective are identified by civilians either by their lieutenant or by what they are known for relying on during their KP rotations and it's no guarantee that anyone will realize that the macaroni marines are also Lieutenant Kagan's marines. Nancy can make the correlation most of the time, but she also spent six months blaming Lieutenant Patchok for all of the kale salads when it was Lieutenant Osgeny's marines who defied the expectations of the masses and did not cook their supply of hearty greens with cream sauce. 

"Potato marines," Mike reports. "But does it matter if we're free of Weapons Company for another few months?" 

Exception: everyone in Atlantis knows if the marines on KP are in Weapons Company or not. 

She heads over to Yoni's lab to see if he can come to lunch - he was on the group message but hadn't said anything one way or the other. He's around and saw the messages, but tells her that he's got to go offworld this afternoon - a mission that can't be put off or foisted off - and between that and the strong possibility of a command staff meeting later, he would like to be able to say he did some productive work today. 

The potato marines live up to their billing and her willpower in the face of curly sweet potato fries is no greater than endlessly refreshing her email during The Crawl. They are joined by Eric Klass, Master Dentist and Joke Teller, and Ruby Agwuegbo from Pharmacology, and so lunch is an upbeat affair because Ruby has all of the gossip from the latest set-to between her unit and Chemistry and there is nothing more Montagu-and-Capulet overdramatic than Pharma-Chem brouhahas. 

She's back in her lab failing to ignore the email icon when the news hits and she misses it. She can't demonstrate any patience waiting for her email but she can somehow tune out the rest, which is why she is not the first person in the unit to find out that Jerusalem got bombed by the Ori. She would probably be one of the last except for the fact that everyone in Medical thinks she's Yoni's keeper and so she's got half a dozen DMs asking her if she knows and is this why Yoni is not in his lab anymore. 

She tells everyone who asks, none of whom are Carson, that Yoni went offworld with his team on a scheduled mission, but she doesn't honestly know that. Command staff get the databurst before everyone else does so that they can prepare, so Yoni knew would have seen the news before he had to leave. He might still be in the city; Major Lorne wouldn't make him go stand around and watch him negotiate for lettuce or whatever they had to do today if he didn't want to. 

Being considered Yoni's keeper bugs the crap out of her most days because Yoni is technically kind of her boss and even if he weren't, he's a grown-ass man perfectly capable of taking care of himself and will fight you if you tell him otherwise. But the rest of the time she considers it a good thing because Yoni is also her friend and he's genuinely crap at certain basic elements of self-care. She wants to hunt down and hurt whoever made him so fantastically afraid of being vulnerable that he hides parts of himself he's clearly not used to hiding and it occasionally makes him act like he's had an emotional limb cut off. 

(The abrupt rudeness is not that. That is just Yoni being Israeli and it's a national trait shared by every other Israeli in both galaxies.) 

She knows he's not going to be in his lab, but she checks anyway. The laminated cartoon drawing of a trio of anthropomorphic green peas in combat helmets is attached to his lab door ("war and peas," which is apparently Carson's doing) and that's what's always there when he's going offworld with Major Lorne and so she doesn't bother ringing the bell or barging in. Instead, she goes to bother Carson, who probably has enough to do but will be worried about Yoni and will respect that she is, too. 

"He's going on his team's mission," he tells her, looking at his watch. "It's for the best. I don't think either sympathy or idleness will do him any good right now and Major Lorne is a friend."

Yoni's from Tel Aviv and not Jerusalem, but she knows at least one of his sisters lives there. Also, Jerusalem is tiny compared to Dhaka or Beijing and now that they know what kind of munitions were used there, it's not impossible that half of Israel was obliterated. She doesn't know, though, so she asks. 

"It happened today," Carson tells her with a frown that's as much about his own helplessness as anything else. "They don't know all of the details yet, just threw it in like they didn't consider what kind of a bomb it was. We don't know if there's a hole where the Middle East used to be or if it was a targeted attack and now we've got to wait a week to find out. There are fifteen Israelis in Atlantis, I don't know how many Jews. Throw in the Muslims and the observant Christians who've lost a holy site today, then give everyone of faith a legitimate fear that their places of importance are going to be demolished next... 

"I can see why someone might have thought it a good idea to send the information along, but the sheer fucking thoughtlessness of it makes me so very angry," he says, then sighs. "I'm sorry, lass. I shouldn't be taking this out on you." 

She can't help but smile. "Who can you take it out on, Carson? Your usual choice is offworld negotiating for lentils and the actual culprits are in another galaxy." 

The rest of the day is kind of shot, as it was after they found out about Beijing and Dhaka, and she can see why people kinda joke about Tuesday afternoons being likely to become permanently optional working hours because there's no way to keep on truckin' while they absorb the latest body blow from Earth. 

She actually does stay in her lab the rest of the afternoon, though, not working terribly productively but also not willing to give herself over to the latest wave of sincere grief buffeting the city. It's too hard to be around and she doesn't know what happens if the war doesn't turn around soon, if it gets like this weekly and the jokes about Tuesday afternoons aren't jokes anymore. 

They came here under a certain set of assumptions based on a decade of Stargate Program history and the first couple of years of their time here lived up to (and down to) the billing in both galaxies. But the change in pattern, the change in expectations, has thrown all of them whether they were recruited specifically for Atlantis or whether they were already SGC personnel who'd been part of the initial expedition. They have to convince each other that it's better to be here, far away from the front but at least still in the fight, than back home living their ignorant pre-recruitment lives and not knowing what the hell is going on because their entire worldview's been overturned. 

"We got a break between 'there are aliens' and 'these particular aliens seem to be good at trying to kill us,'" Biro says one day. "It's hard to remember that that's a blessing most days, but it is." 

She knows Yoni will be no more interested in accepting sympathy or kindness when he gets back from his mission than before and if he is willing to talk to anyone, it will be one of the other Israelis. But after she finally gives up making attempts to work for the day, she goes down to the commissary and asks one of the potato marines if she can put in a takeout dinner order for Doctor Safir once he's back. She doesn't know exactly when that will be and confesses as much, but Sergeant Gomez assures her that they have ways of finding out when Major Lorne's team comes back and can take care of it - they'll even deliver it if she wants. 

Her goal is to make sure Yoni eats something rather than take credit for the idea, so she readily agrees and thanks the sergeant for his kindness. Yoni's got food in his apartment, they all do, but she knows it's mostly breakfast food and convenience food for when you just don't feel like going to the commissary and she wants more for him than corn flakes for dinner. 

She doesn't see him until two days later; she's got clinic shifts this week and he is intentionally keeping odd hours to avoid people and still be able to go to the command staff meetings and take part in the Jewish services that he normally doesn't care about outside of holidays. He turns up with Ronon during her clinic shift; both of them need stitches and possibly a talking-to from one of the gunnery sergeants about useful outlets of rage and grief because she's sewing up _knife wounds_ , but she settles for the stitches and maybe enjoys the fact that it's Tomita who has the task of getting Yoni (wrist) and Ronon (knee) to wear a brace for the rest of the week. Yoni seems fine-ish, which means nothing, and he assures her that Israelis are used to this kind of shit, but he can't quite pull off the cavalier tone he's going for.

The details of the attack come the following week in the databurst and this time there's no offworld mission and no meetings and his voice breaks when he tells her that his sister Michal, the one who went orthodox, and her husband and her five children are all dead and his sister Galit, the biotech engineer, is fighting for her life after her car was blown off the road by the shockwave. One of his nephews was missing for three days before he was dug out of the rubble and his college girlfriend, the one he lived with for years, is still missing but presumed dead. He's lost cousins and colleagues and guys from his military unit and classmates and friends; Israel lost more then thirty percent of its population in an afternoon. All she can do is try to offer comfort and be grateful that he's willing to accept it - and wonder if there will be a time when it's her turn to weep.

 _Daedalus_ shows up to kidnap McKay. They bring supplies and people and the first loads of the early Christmas presents their families knew to start shipping before Halloween, but they're here to kidnap McKay. Everyone in Atlantis realizes this without being told because Science can't hide their surprise; the entire division is spasming in some kind of chaos because everything involving McKay - and that's a tremendous amount - has to be reshuffled and reassigned. If there was any kind of protest or argument, Nancy doesn't hear about it but she doesn't imagine there was one. Every week the databurst brings more news of attacks on Earth and planets falling to the Ori and it's not Tuesday afternoons that are the lost hours anymore, it's Tuesday _mornings_ because the dread becomes paralyzing. McKay has to go because if there's any chance he can do there what he does here, there's no alternative. 

She asks Mike Abelard if this is what it was like during the first year of the expedition, when everyone was waiting for the Wraith to come, for the siege to begin. 

"This is worse," he tells her. "At least for me. We were scared for our lives back then, don't get me wrong. It was a constant, gut-wrenching weight that never went away and we had the ulcers to prove it. But... it was just us. None of us wanted to die, but we kind of accepted that our lives might be forfeit if it meant that the Wraith wouldn't get what they needed to be able to go to Earth - Atlantis would be destroyed before that would happen. Now? We're watching Earth in peril and there's nothing we can do about it and I find the helplessness a lot worse than the impending doom.

"We're not soldiers and we aren't even the kind of scientists who can come up with a ray gun to aim at the Ori and blow them up, but I'd rather be a speed bump on the Wraith road to Earth than just... watching and waiting." 

She spends time in Little Tripoli and the marines are just as frustrated with the idleness, although not as destructive about it as they were the other month. It's from them that she finds out that Staff Sergeant Reletti, formerly of Atlantis and Major Lorne's offworld team, is now the team sergeant on SG-3 and the subject of much envy in Little Tripoli despite the acknowledged likelihood that he does not live until Christmas. The lists of gate team personnel killed in action is kept out of the main body of the This Week in the SGC news; you have to click on a link to a separate file to see how long it has gotten. 

Toward that end, Medical has been given a warning that they are now going to start accepting wounded SG team members who turn up in Atlantis aboard _Odyssey_ or _Daedalus_. They've already been treating the wounded, all of whom have been evacuated from battlefields and have been under the ships' medical teams' care for at least the three weeks of the journey to Atlantis. But they've all been put back aboard to travel home and that will change; the only wounded who will make the round trip will be those who will be able to immediately return to action once they're back in the Milky Way. 

Atlantis doesn't have the facilities for long-term critical care, nor the personnel; anyone who needs this kind of effort has always been wormholed back to Earth. The department meeting following the announcement is loud and long. Carson and Yoni know better than anyone what kinds of personnel and material shortages they've been running with since the Ori came through the Supergate and they've done their best to work around it, but the rest of them have nobody else to yell at that this isn't right or fair to either them or their incoming patients. It's not a matter of doubling their workload or taking them away from their research. It's that with the exception of a few people like Osterman and Klass none of them were practitioners before coming to Atlantis. Getting refresher courses in practical aspects of their specialties and some very limited cross-training in emergency medicine is not enough for this kind of care the way they make it work for clinic shifts. They need relevant specialists and more nurses than they could ever dream of asking for, equipment that doesn't exist in this galaxy, and an ER's worth of supplies. They have none of that, but they will have to make do. 

The first shipload of wounded is installed in the hastily-constructed new ward, which is in turn not nearly big enough because they've got ten men and they were expecting maybe four or five. Volnik earns precisely one week of reprieve from being Atlantis's most hated man because Bio-Medical Engineering gins up two respirators out of spare parts and an Ancient air filter and then he fixes the dialysis machine personally when it breaks at two in the morning. (Volnik then does something awful and everyone goes back to hating him.) They get relief and supplies along with the third wave of patients; the Pegasus Airlift brings them ten nurses, two emergency medicine specialists, two internists, two LCSWs, a plastics guy who can handle burns and shrapnel, a neuro with TBI experience to support Laurentian, an orthopod, and Samira Bennani (GYN) who initially doesn't understand why her arrival is funny. Others turn up along with sufficient materials and equipment and the largesse is possibly making them uneasy because What the Mountain Didn't Give Us has been the most popular song in Atlantis since Nancy got here. 

Every time they get new arrivals in the hospital, now built out to better reflect its purpose, Nancy gets asked in Little Tripoli if Reletti is one of them. She knows they know he's not - there are marines serving as orderlies and that would be instantaneously transmitted. But she still gets asked, as if the orderlies could have missed his arrival either because it wasn't their shift or he was too wounded to be recognized. But SG-3 is never aboard one of the ships in any capacity and she remarks that maybe this should be taken as good news. 

"It could mean he's fine, ma'am," Sergeant Kwan tells her. "Or it means he's a prisoner or he's dead. Statistically, that's probably more likely." 

It's not more likely, but she'd sound like a Pollyanna if she said so because it might be soon. 

Lieutenant Eriksson's entire platoon comes back from a trade mission with food poisoning, which is a problem because they were trading for food. Atlantis could never feed itself off of what comes in the holds of the _Daedalus_ and _Odyssey_ , but it's much worse now and they can't just throw away everything Eriksson's boys brought back with them. And so Medical has to design an experiment to figure it out after Plant Biology can't identify the culprit: they are going to make marines eat things until something makes them sick. 

"Gentle poisoning," Carson offers with a shrug. "They've done themselves worse harm with their moonshine experiments." 

"Payback for Weapons Company's near-deer stew," Yoni suggests instead. 

Eriksson's platoon is not in Weapons Company and is exempted from the exercise. The marines are surprisingly game to eat until they either puke or get the shits, which is kind of exactly what they are being asked to do, but Nancy is reminded that they also volunteer for things like testing out the non-lethal crowd control stuff Engineering comes up with. 

"You know what Marine stands for, Doc?" Fletcher, one of the Navy Corpsmen, asks. "Muscles Are Required, Intelligence Not Expected." 

It's the grapes that are the problem, for the record. 

The refugees start coming after the Ori land armies on Earth for the first time. It's how they get McKay back, but it's also how the city seems to practically double in size over the next couple of months. There are a lot of SGC civilian scientists, but then come refugees from other Milky Way planets and the marines have to start sharing Little Tripoli with a company of USAF Security Forces. Nancy is told by the marines that the SFs are mall cops, but the SFs are led by Evie Sato, who becomes one of Nancy's judo partners and then her friend and Evie's got plenty to say about the marines. The SFs are soon the city's actual cops. The Galarans are technologically copacetic with Earth, if a little behind, so they wind up being junior staff in Medical and Science and this is how Nancy starts learning about the war from a non-SGC perspective and how Atlantis as a whole has to start a reckoning with how they handle People Not Them. How they handle themselves. 

Atlantis was never meant to be a real society; it is a very immersive work environment modeled after and very much like a military deployment. They have been expected to prioritize their professional responsibilities and leave their personal drama and their life plans back on Earth. But here they are and there is no going home now, not for anyone, and what - and who - they left behind is no longer something they are paid not to think about while in Pegasus. There are people here with spouses and partners back home, some with kids, and apart from odd cases like McKay everyone had concrete plans to do their thing in Atlantis and then go back to Earth and get on with their lives in a disclosed location with the people they cared about. Nancy came here on a one-year blind commitment and she extended it for another three, but she signed that extension figuring that would be the end of her time in space, that she'd go back to Earth and start tilting the work-life balance back toward life so that she had one she was happy with and could share with people without an SCI clearance. 

But none of that is possible right now and there's a growing chance that it might not be possible for a very long time. And so everyone here has to figure out how to make Atlantis a home, which feels like defeat and there are plenty of people who refuse to think about it because of that. Doctor Weir writes letters to them that go up on the Atlantis website, gives talks to anyone who wants to show up to them, all of it bringing up the same points: they have to figure out how to _live_ here now, for however long until they can go back to Earth. 

"We did not do this sufficiently during the initial expedition," she tells her listeners the first time Nancy goes to one of the talks. "And I take full responsibility for that. We had put our hopes and dreams for ourselves on hold by agreeing to go to Atlantis before we could be guaranteed a trip home and once we were here... to quote a friend, it was easier to keep punting that football down the field. 'We'll worry about it once we get our research set up, once we secure necessities and trade partners, once we re-establish contact with Earth.' 

"And our community here, instead of working to actually _build a community_... we just worked instead. We worked, we discovered wondrous things, we faced terrible dangers and implacable foes, and we worked some more. And without anything else poured into the foundation, our community bonds were thus formed only by a shared relief that we'd survived another day. 

"But we are more than merely proximate to each other. It is long past time Atlantis as a city and a community accepts that our social compact is deeper and richer than whatever policies HR has written. This is a time of terrible darkness and we must make our own light however we can. We have to take our hopes and dreams out of storage and try to see which ones can be lived now, here. There is a version of our best self who can thrive in Atlantis and it's up to us to nurture that."

What Weir is proposing, practically speaking, is a relaxing of some of the cultural mores that relied most heavily on Atlantis being only a workplace environment. The expectation that you will hide your personality and interests, keep your love life on the down-low, and go along and shut up no matter how much you dislike something... these needed to be gentled. She wants a lot more clubs and interest-oriented societies, for instance, and for people to actually wear their civilian clothes on days off. She wants a newspaper that doesn't function like a house organ. She wants to figure out a way to destigmatize interpersonal relationships, which is a nice idea but Nancy has no idea how that would work in action. Jocks (marines) versus Nerds (scientists) is a social exclusionary policy that has nothing to do with aliens or Atlantis. And maybe because of that, dating in Atlantis is somewhere between a little weird and an HR problem waiting to happen while the hook-up culture is almost undergrad-esque. Atlantis civilian personnel more or less self-select for socially quirky, which doesn't help, but Nancy isn't the only one has essentially given up on serious dating while in Pegasus. For every Harlequin romance that is Dani Esposito and Lieutenant Gillick, there are a lot more awkward encounters in the commissary because there's a reason "don't fish off the company pier" is a truism that's even more true when you live at your job site. 

The other part of how they treat themselves and each other is how they treat The Other. The Galarans are in some ways no more alien to Atlantis than the SFs, strangers with whom they have enough in common that they can build bridges. The Galarans attached to Medical and Science do scutwork and basic research in their new roles, generally eager to learn and to show off what they know. But some of the Galaran refugees are not scientists or doctors, some of them are homemakers or artists or government functionaries and what do they do? And every subsequent batch of refugees, almost none of them from post-Industrial societies, how do they fit into a community that has zero unemployment and "unskilled labor" previously meant that you were a (highly trained) marine? How do you develop a social welfare state on the fly? And how do you not create a class system with a permanent immigrant underclass doing all of the menial work? 

The answer is that you can't, or at least they can't. At least not at first. The refugees without skills commensurate with existing work in Atlantis (which is practically everyone outside the Galarans) become janitors and laundry workers and take over for the marines on KP - or they go out to the mainland and live with the other refugees in the Athosian settlement because Atlantis literally can't afford to support idle hands. Weir is up front with the Atlantis residents about how quickly their needs are expanding and how slowly they are meeting that increased demand. There is no budget deficit they can run, there is no one in Pegasus who will spot them credit - nobody can afford to hold Atlantis's debts. Pegasus is mostly a barter economy and "we'll pay you next month" is too risky for most worlds when the Wraith get a vote. And with regular resupply from Earth no longer possible, Atlantis can no longer afford to be munificent and they are struggling to afford to be _kind_. Everyone is now expected to do their part to increase Atlantis's capacity. 

Nancy goes out twice as often on what used to be MEDCAPs to make friends and influence people but are now straight-up trading medical care for goods they need. 

There's still a lot of guilt and self-consciousness among the Earth-born Atlantis people and her own waxes and wanes. She did years of refugee-related work in Sub-Saharan Africa; she knows that the people coming to Atlantis now are too scarred by their experiences and too grateful to be alive to be resentful of what they don't have here and might not have had at home before the Ori. She doesn't think there's a problem now, but she also doesn't think the status quo can last forever. 

The next group of refugees don't need to be assessed for utility, however. She gets woken up in the middle of the night by a call from Yoni, who tells her to grab her gear and get down to the gate room because Alpha Company just showed up. 

"Are you drunk?" is her angry reply, since she spends enough time in Little Tripoli to know that Alpha Company is the Godot of the Atlantis Marines - they are never, ever showing up despite being assigned to Pegasus three years ago. Elvis singing "Viva Las Vegas" in front of the stargate is more likely than Alpha Company being there. 

"I would like to be drunk," Yoni tells her. "Instead, there are a hundred-plus casualties of varying severity in the gate room." 

Alpha Company made it to Pegasus because the scientists they were protecting on Kheb jury-rigged a DHD supercharger that allowed them to dial Atlantis from the Milky Way - a battery they'd never tested on anything and one that had the capacity to vaporize Kheb's entire solar system if it didn't work as planned. This kind of desperation sends a chill throughout Atlantis. It's one thing to know that the war is not going well, that planets all over the Milky Way have fallen and that there are nations on Earth that have already accepted the Ori. But Sierra Leone holding prostration ceremonies doesn't rattle them the way this does because they're used to being protected by marines and they are used to USMC risk assessment - what the Atlantis marines will let them try, even in extremis. That Captain Armstrong was willing to go along with this when he still had most of his men able to fight... This is a horror they can measure in terms they can fully understand, not like the twenty million dead in Beijing and Dhaka. It's quantifiable with respect to their own experiences. 

The SGC warns them that databursts will now be infrequent and irregular; they don't have the time or resources to do things like compile civilian emails or PDFs of academic journals and the details of the war in the Milky Way aren't time sensitive to Atlantis until they have word that the Ori are headed to Pegasus. Both _Daedalus_ and _Odyssey_ will continue to make regular voyages out and they will carry supplies and whatever personal mail has already been accrued, but the bottom line is that Atlantis has to make preparations to live a more isolated existence. It won't be a return to first year conditions, Weir repeats this over and over again as she tries to quell the anger and disappointment. But that's no comfort. 

The war on Earth is ongoing and it's not just big cities anymore; they all live in fear for their families and their friends. The thin line of communication that was the databurst was their only connection to their homes and everyone they love and it's being taken from them. They are out here unprepared for this... hellish version of _Gilligan's Island_ that was suppose to be a three-year tour in Pegasus and has left them stranded far away from everything and largely unable to help anyone. It's been months since they tried to prop each other up by talking about being a part of the fight; they are not part of the fight in any real way. There is a growing sentiment that if the SGC cannot afford to support Atlantis during the war, then they should shut the expedition down and bring everyone home. Nancy both agrees with it and doesn't; there's a definite operational need for a base in Pegasus and she doesn't think they can just drop their commitments here and go home, but she really wishes that they could. She doesn't know what she would do if they did go home, maybe sign up to be a field medic or something like that. But being out here doesn't feel good anymore and it doesn't feel _right_ and she is so scared for everyone back home. 

This feeling doesn't go away. She doesn't think she's depressed; the entire city is in a depression, but there is a difference between that and the referrals to Mental Health Services that they all make on clinic shifts. Kate Heightmeyer's got five times as many people now as she did two years ago, but everyone there is still working long hours and so Nancy uses her friends as therapists and expects them to do the same. They all have their bouts of failing to cope and joke that they should try to coordinate so that they're not simultaneous. Evie Sato, furious that her requests to return to the Milky Way to fight keep getting rejected while SG team officers who get medical clearance just board a ship without having to ask, partially dislocates Nancy's shoulder during a judo match. She's still wearing the harness when she loses her shit in the lab area coffee room after there was only sour milk in the fridge and smashes the carafe and then starts crying because they can't just order a new one on Amazon anymore and so Lori drags her over to Yoni's lab and tells him to watch her because she's got a surgery in forty-five minutes and can't do it herself.  
  
"Do you want diazepam or your laptop?" Yoni asks her once Lori leaves. "You can't have both."

What she wants is a tissue, maybe a few. And then to find a transporter in Yoni's lab closet because she really, really doesn't want to go back out to face her colleagues. Who will be understanding and agree that replacing the milk is good manners and assure her that General Supply still has plenty of extra carafes because everyone knows that Applied Mathematics has butterfingers and drops them on the regular - Medical sees the burns and glass wounds. But she doesn't want the attention or the sympathy. She wants to be back on Earth, she wants to hug her dad, she wants to stop being afraid for five minutes. Maybe an hour. 

She starts crying again before she can give Yoni an answer. 

Yoni doesn't have a couch in his lab like the rest of them do; he has an Ancient beanbag chair, which are like regular beanbag chairs except the size of a Yugo and filled with some kind of gel that half of Atlantis would rather cuddle a Wraith than sit on. His is in a corner with good lighting and a low table because he uses it as a workspace and he leads her over there now, gesturing for her to sit down. He disappears from view for a minute, then returns with the tissue box and his laptop and sippy cup and a bottle of water, the first and last of which he hands to her before sitting down as well. The weird gel doesn't make her bounce and instead she continues to kind of sink in and be ergonomically supported at all points. They're not touching, but they're close enough that she can spidey-sense his presence. 

She blows her nose a few times and accumulates a small pile of tissues in her lap as she wipes her tears and tries to calm down for real. Next to her, Yoni types away at his laptop. 

"I'm sorry," she says after a few minutes. She has tried to avoid metaphorically bleeding on him because it feels self-absorbed to ask him to take a break from his mourning to allay her catastrophizing. She's afraid of what will happen, but he's dealing with what already has. She has tried to make things easier for him, be there when he'll let her, and this isn't that. 

He doesn't look up. "Reilly already got a new carafe." 

She sighs and debates calling him on the deflection or accepting that neither of them really want to talk about it. 

"Grief and sadness are not finite resources," he says, this time looking over at her. "Yours does not take away from mine and vice versa." 

She wants to say that she hasn't had to grieve yet, but she has and she knows she has. They all have because even if the Ori are defeated tomorrow, their lives have changed drastically and not for the better. She tells this to her patients in the clinic, she tells this to the marines who apologize for acting out near her or at her, she tells this to her friends. Physician, heal thyself. 

Something must show on her face because Yoni gives her a half-smile and she leans over just enough to lean her head on his shoulder. She means to do it as a kind of headbutt to acknowledge him being the emotionally mature one for once, but winds up staying there and maybe dozes a little. 

They're easier with each other after that, less afraid to be both silly and distraught, and she will consider that a benefit when the rest of that afternoon's events are just embarrassing. She missed him when she was giving him space he might not have wanted. 

It becomes important because while things are easier between them, everything else gets a whole lot harder. 

Captain Hanzis nearly beats BME's Brad Perotelli to death in the commissary for bragging about how he's going to need to thank the Ori for his Nobel Prize and then telling Hanzis to fuck off when told to pipe down because he was being an asshole at too high a volume. Everyone thinks Perotelli was being a first class dick - there are people who talk like that, like this is still some temporary inconvenience that they can mine for treasure, but most of them understand that not everyone feels that way and to STFU when called on it. But... but. This was not a one-punch affair, it was a beat-down that some in the city are calling attempted murder and the civilian-military divide is what it is and so Mike Hanzis has to pay for what he did while nobody expects Perotelli to do more than heal from his wounds without too much sympathy. Nancy hates that the default sentiment of civilians in the city about marines is that they are pit bulls on leashes, violent animals good for protection but would eat their owners if they slip the leash. She also hates that the marines, as a body, look at the civilians as sheep to be protected from the wolves and she's considered remarkable because she recognizes the language of the sheepdogs. 

Hanzis is sentenced to six months in the brig after a trial that saw Major Lorne acting as his defending counsel arguing for mitigating circumstances and Hanzis himself protesting the attempt to get him off the hook. Hanzis's obviously genuine remorse defuses the city's tension more than the sentence, which everyone understands to be scaled down because Hanzis is both Weapons Company commander and head of the city's intelligence operations. Perotelli is a pariah outside of Bio-Medical Engineering. The city endures, some days better than others.

"Weir wants us to start coming up with stuff it's important to save," Roberta walks into to the break room one afternoon. "Like 'Earth is sinking, what are we putting in the lifeboat' kind of saving." 

Most of them have just come out of a seminar about functional nervous system disorders, so none of them have looked at their email for the last forty-five minutes and all of them came in here wanting coffee and donuts. (Deep-frying dough is possibly the intergalactic commonality; the refugees running the kitchens can crank out all kinds of creations that Dunkin never thought of.) But while Nancy's found happiness with a still-warmish masala chai cruller by another name, that happiness is in flight at Yee's announcement. 

"Are we talking about Charlie Chaplin movies or the recipe for Toll House cookies or Dolly Parton?" Abelard asks warily. 

"Dolly Parton goes in the lifeboat, no arguments allowed," Nancy tells him, then turns back to Roberta. "What are you talking about?" 

Weir is asking them to come up with a list of cultural items they think are important to preserve if Earth falls to the Ori. It's like the blasts in Beijing and Dhaka - nothing they can really conceptualize. They have joked for years about what NORAD and NASA "send to the aliens" (as opposed to what the SGC freely gives to any and all off-world populations), about which Beatles songs and which Beethoven symphonies and whether Pocky should count. But this is for real, even if it seems like some hellish social media meme where you have to pick which five of these ten songs get to ever be played again. _It might actually happen._

The instructions are more detailed and shockingly well thought through despite the big font warnings that this is still a largely theoretical exercise that will still be useful when the Ori are defeated. (It says "when" and not "if" and nobody's sure if that's optimism or honest belief.) Everyone not from the US is exhorted to collaborate with their fellow nationals and make sure that American culture is not overrepresented. The mandate is for the entire world's cultures to be present (preserved) and Roberta wasn't wrong - it feels like they are packing up a go-bag to evacuate Earth as if they're fleeing a burning apartment building. It's devastating in a way the irregular databursts that foster anxiety and isolation are not because the databursts are irregular for lots of reasons and some of those actually have nothing to do with the war, but there's only one reason to do this. 

To avoid the panic that goes along with "one of Mozart's concertos might be obliterated from reality" or "I didn't like _Titanic_ but it shouldn't be disappeared," Nancy tries spends an hour each evening mentally revisiting her life, especially her travels, and coming up with something from each place and each moment in time that isn't already here with her, safe from the Ori (for now). She ripped her _Pinky and the Brain _DVDs and most of her music collection before she left for Pegasus so that she could have them with her, but there's still plenty that's not on her hard drive or on the Atlantis Napster server that she wants to survive.__

____

____

(The SGC gave them dedicated servers for music and movies, taking advantage of the secretive nature of the program to avoid the dubious legality when it meant saving physical space. Atlantis Netflix, like Atlantis Napster, is surprisingly robust. Like its Earth counterpart, however, it also has plenty of things you wonder who watches. Nothing's there that wasn't explicitly requested, however, so guessing who is to blame for any particular item has been a parlor game everyone in the city plays.)

Everyone else is more or less doing what she is - coming up with a mixtape for her life - and almost to spite why it's happening it becomes a positive experience. There is more music played in Atlantis after the announcement than at any point since she's been here, more discussion about movies or television shows or books. People wonder if the Louvre is still intact, if the cathedrals in Italy are rubble, if Hampi still stands, if _Apollo_ can take pictures of the Nazca lines since all it's doing is orbiting Earth. It's somehow not a city-wide argument, instead a sharing: here is something I experienced and want it to be available for others to do the same. The Atlantis Film Society starts showing double features three times a week; the Architecture unit in G-2 creates a website full of photographs of world wonders. And the commissary, which has been a rotating menu of completely novel foods from refugee worlds alongside weird takes on traditional Earth cafeteria fare, starts producing credible versions of cheeseburgers and baozi and bunny chow and boreks and other dishes that someone in Atlantis calls comfort food and offered up a recipe for. (Salonen is unrepentant about the nakkikastike that appears, which of course goes over like gangbusters because it's hot dogs and they are all not-so-secretly kids at heart.) It's more World's Fair than a wake for a world in peril and if makes them all homesick, then it also makes them glad to be from Earth. 

The glide path from "how many arrangements of Beethoven's symphonies do we need to have?" to the American president kneeling before the Orici at Robler Rock isn't obvious in the year or so it takes. They are aware that things are going badly, but they are also increasingly cut off from the Milky Way and can't contextualize good news or bad very well. They know that Reletti got sent to Antarctica to man the Ancient control chair there because there's a ZPM for it now, that the SGC has officially packed up and left NORAD because proximity to the stargate is no longer worth the risk to North American defense capabilities, that Sam Carter figured out a way to deploy in the field the same kind of shield the SGC uses for the stargate, that Daniel Jackson has been captured by the Ori. It is all met with the same kind of anxiety-induced nausea because it's so far away and still under the skin. 

There are still moments of abject grief that pierce the shroud, disasters that hit like body blows, but they no longer have the strength or energy to reel from the impact like they once did. Tragedy no longer paralyzes the city, even if it can occasionally do a number on a person. Medical sees its first suicide attempts and overdoses and Carson has to write up protocols for coroner duties because they haven't had unattended non-combat deaths in Atlantis before this. 

They also have to set up a maternity ward; they have birthed babies in Atlantis before, a couple of high-risk pregnancies and complicated deliveries from the Mainland or Ipetia, but this is the first time they've made their own babies in-house and kept them here. Nancy's not part of the actual discussion, that's Weir and Carson and Yoni and Osterman and Bennani, but the decision to make a permanent change to their space is not a secret, nor why. Copper IUDs are the contraceptives of choice for female Atlantis personnel for many practical reasons, most importantly that they last for years. But not everyone has them and their condom supply is not infinite and some people are, in fact, taking Weir's exhortation to start living fuller lives much more enthusiastically than others. And so Osterman and Bennani are actually using the OB part of their titles for more than just indigenous populations. And Atlantis has its first baptism. 

A surprise databurst tells them that Antarctica Base finally launched its attack on the Ori fleet; the city's almost giddy because several Ori carriers were destroyed and the Ori were forced to lift the blockade of Earth. Antarctica Base has more drone weapons to do it again if necessary. Everyone's talking about what will be the first thing they do back on Earth and Nancy kind of wishes she didn't spend time with military personnel because all of them are buzzkills about what happens next and it's not a trip to Mickey D's. And all of them turn out to be right. 

She's in Little Tripoli when Weir makes the announcement about Earth's surrender, hanging out in Evie's office waiting for her to finish some paperwork before they go down to the gym to spar. Weir's speech is short and doesn't offer any details - she doesn't know anything yet, just that it has happened because of the protocols the SGC worked out to send warning. 

First Sergeant Rosario appears in the doorway. Nancy knows she should get up to go, that Evie's about to have a very busy rest of the day (week, month) and they are not going to the gym, but it's hard to move. 

"The Major'll let us know," Evie tells Rosario with a shrug. "There'll be fuck-all to talk about until he and Sheppard find out what's in the databurst. Nothing changes for now. Remind everyone to be gentle." 

Evie goes back to typing on her laptop and Nancy wonders how she can function because she herself feels like her puppet strings have been cut. This isn't a _surprise_ , but it's a shock and a big one. 

"This isn't the end," Evie says without pausing in her typing. "This is a change of state, like liquid to gas, but it's not the end of anything. We aren't going to stop fighting, not there and not here. The fight has changed, that's all." 

Nancy looks down at her hands, tied in knots, and untangles her fingers. "Do you really believe that?"

Evie gets up from her desk and comes around to where Nancy is sitting and takes her hands in her own, which aren't nearly as cold. 

"I do," she says with conviction. "We aren't meant to lie down and _take this_. Earth formally surrendered, but we aren't part of Earth anymore. This is our sublimation: we just became intergalactic non-state actors. We're the ones they are going to have to spend blood and treasure hunting down after their 'victory' over the official army. We are the insurgents. This is what O'Neill and the others planned for, why they kept giving us resources they could have used themselves. They knew we were going to need them for this. Antarctica Base wasn't the last stand - we are." 

It's something Nancy thinks about later on, when she's sitting out in the park with Lori and half of Medical and probably three quarters of the civilians in the city. It's a beautiful night, warm and clear, and the Jidari and Argosy refugees who work in the kitchens have converted some empty fountains into fire pits and are grilling near-deer burgers and preparing food on card tables. It's a wake, right down to the Olerians tending bar. There's crying, but there're also a couple of people with acoustic guitars singing pop songs and Nancy can almost maybe see the shape of it, this future where they are the rebels in a real-life _Star Wars_. She doesn't know how they pull it off, but she's willing to believe in the cause. She has to believe because the alternative is unbearable. 

Not everyone can muster the faith. There are four suicides in the next six days and Weir puts the city on 'buddy watch,' making everyone find a partner to keep tabs on. Carson assigns everyone a buddy in Medical because they're all working crazy hours and he wants people on the same shift, which means Nancy's partner is Jennifer Keller, one of the internists who came in with the Pegasus Airlift. (Yoni and Carson are not on the same shift, but they are buddied up because they are in constant contact anyway with the command staff business.) Jen's amazing with the patients and Nancy honestly enjoys watching her work, but she's rabbity as hell when she's not on the wards, scared of everything, and Nancy does not think this assignment by Carson was any kind of coincidence or convenience. They spend the next week working their asses off during the day - including an emergency call-out to Ipetia because they got hit with what looks like coxsackie - and their nights alternating whose apartment they crash in. They fall asleep talking about everything and nothing and Nancy comes to realize that Jen's spastic because she has a massive case of imposter syndrome despite four years with the program. 

"You do realize that getting recruited by the SGC at all is a helluva achievement, right?" she asks as they flop on the couch in her apartment. She's very proud of this couch, which is a gigantic sectional in a truly appalling shade of blush that she's decorated with too many green pillows and fuzzy throws. Yoni and Evie both pretend they're blind when they look at it, but they've also both have fallen asleep on it. "You weren't some nearby doctor they grabbed when the shit hit the fan. They found you in peacetime. They picked you because you're awesome at what you do." 

Jen is also utterly terrified of Carson, of all people. Yoni doesn't scare her because she figures he's all bark ("although he barks a lot, I will admit"), but she reads passive-aggressiveness into Carson's even keel and Nancy can't even wrap her mind around that one. Neither can Carson when she tells him, which she does because he can't fix what he doesn't know is a problem. 

The city goes off suicide watch and starts explicitly preparing for their new existence as the last bastion of free people from the Milky Way. Most of the projects that they'd been working on for the SGC still have relevance, but a few are quietly shelved in favor of more locally-relevant tasks both back-burnered and brand new. Many of the new tasks are nothing to do with science; G-2 cannot (and should not) remake Atlantis's society by themselves and so Medical and Science and Little Tripoli are required to have representatives on all of these new task forces. Which is how Nancy ends up a committee to develop opportunities for refugees, since it was that or the one about whether Atlantis should develop a hard currency and Carson's far more annoyed at Warner than he is with her. 

_Odyssey_ shows up with almost two hundred refugees and needs to land next to the city because the ship requires repairs that can't be done in the vacuum of space. The refugees aren't in too-bad shape physically, but that's about the only way they're not wrecks. There's a bunch of new information about the attack on the SGC that precipitated the surrender at Robler Rock, but Nancy isn't the only one who doesn't read the articles that appear in the _Pegasus Post_. They detail which of the hundreds of SGC personnel died in the initial air strikes and who was slaughtered by the army that came in to take care of the survivors and... O'Neill is dead, Landry is dead, a dozen men and women who Nancy cared for as they convalesced in Atlantis before returning to the field are dead, and how they died is not a necessary detail. She has grieved their losses already and does not want to re-open the wounds because it means picking at the scabs of her own terror of what her family and friends face now that there is no one to protect them. 

Thankfully, Pegasus provides distractions. She spends almost three weeks on Alemoure because the population's not being felled by some weird Ancient curse that has been killing their children for generations, they have a predisposition to Type 1 diabetes. The Wraith accidentally practice eugenics in Pegasus, eliminating mobility diseases like cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy and others that make it harder to run away and makes the family members carrying the afflicted (and sharing genes) easy targets. But diseases like measles live on and so does diabetes, although Type 2 is much more common here as it is back home. Type 1 requires a lot of ingenuity and effort, though, and it requires more of her and the people she brings with her than any of her humanitarian work on Earth - and perhaps anything she's dealt with here in Pegasus. 

Before the Ori, Atlantis would have emptied out its supply of injectable insulin and glucose gels to stabilize the population until a more lasting remedy could be manufactured. Now, however, they have to keep their pitiful supply of insulin - diabetes is a disqualifying disability as far as the SGC goes - and come up with something else. It's a transaction the way all of their foreign policy is now and Nancy's grateful that she doesn't have to argue that they should be doing this anyway. It's at least not an extortionary exchange; they found Alemoure in the first place because they are a water world with beaches covered in silica sand and so Atlantis is treating the population in exchange for the right to cart off as much sand as they want. The locals consider this free medical care, but Science is out of its mind with relief because it's apparently very pure silica that they very much need. 

She winds up leading a whole team of specialists to come up with a way to overhaul the nation's diet and fake insulin production with resources to hand, which includes a squad of the Olerian refugees because they are herbalists and have been studying native Pegasus flora for all kinds of reasons and they are utterly invaluable now. Yoni is there for the first several days because he does these kinds of medical history interviews better than anyone else in Atlantis, but he presents his findings to her and goes back home to deal with the arriving _Daedalus_. The work is exhausting and devastating - they lose one toddler to a diabetic coma and death because he won't eat the special mash they produce and she cries herself to sleep that night. But by the time she packs up to go home, Alemoure is on the road to a more stable future. They send her back with a gift basket of dried fruit (now to be consumed by the locals in strict moderation and mostly exported for trade) and glasswork, including a pair of necklaces made up of iridescent beads and a water pitcher that looks like it's on fire when the sunlight hits it. 

_Daedalus_ brought more refugees, including survivors of the Ori attacks on the SGC and especially including Staff Sergeant Reletti. Nancy doesn't see him for a few weeks after he returns, but when she does it's a shock. He looks like a refugee, which he is, and not the clever goofball he'd been in Atlantis before they'd sent him back to go to college, which is how he's lived in her memories. He looks like he's spent the last few years at war and it chastens her even as he smiles at her and asks how she's been. The boy is gone, she tells Lori later. He was going anyway, that's how it is supposed to happen, but it was yanked from him instead of sloughed away and you can see the scars. 

The ships bring more than exhausted fighters and refugees - sometimes they bring board games and bicycles and Pringles along with whatever they can find that has a more straightforward tactical use. They empty out big box store distribution centers, so Atlantis has tampons and toilet paper and tube socks and toothpaste in quantity. Small comforts are a huge morale booster and nobody in Medical minds the extra work from the bicycles and trampolines too much. Who knew Carson could skateboard? 

The city finds new food sources including pineapples and rice; the bumper crops of zucchini and tomatoes they're already growing on Ipetia give rise to an immigrant-run canning operation that takes over a section of the city because they're also making their own glass jars with the silica from Alemoure. Ronon nearly starts a war with the Genii on Manaria and Nancy winds up spending three days offworld in the same clothes after a simple day trip to do check-ups goes pear-shaped because of it. 

"I know better than to go anywhere with you," she tells Lieutenant Murray afterward. "But you brought me back in one piece, so free stitches next time you need them!" 

The Atlantis Film Society has a Disney Week, every night starting out with a couple of Merrie Melodies before the feature film, that they have to open up an extra two screening rooms for. Even Colonel Sheppard and Doctor Weir go. 

_Odyssey_ is lured into a trap and destroyed by the Ori, killing all hands aboard. Colonel Ellis had been their Santa Claus - literally so last Christmas when he'd brought stuffed animals for them to give away to kids and an actual ton of Kinder eggs. He and his people had brought bits of home and hope when they'd arrived and it's not like the people in Atlantis didn't appreciate the risk, but... But it's a hard reminder of their reality that none of them really needed. 

Nancy inadvertently starts a stitch 'n bitch club by inviting Lori and Evie over for Irish coffee and cake two Tuesdays in a row and then it becomes a rotating thing. Evie invites Manika Gantry and Lori says they should invite Jen Keller, who brings her knitting because she thought it was a real stitch 'n bitch club and from then on everyone actually does bring stuff to do. Lori crochets ("I was a Happy Hooker during my residency!") and Manika does needlepoint ("Trust me, stabbing things over and over again is really therapeutic when you spend as much time with marines as I have since I got commissioned") and Evie embroiders and Nancy knocks the rust off of her origami skills, which isn't as useful a life skill as the others' but everyone wants a paper tiger. 

It's a life skill that becomes a bit more useful after the next call to show up in the gate room to deal with a surprise refugee mosh pit, which does not come in the middle of the night nor does it actually require much plasma. Colonel Mitchell has shown up with two hundred refugees dropped off on the waystation planet by _Daedalus_ because there are a couple hundred more still on the ship and they're running out of food. The ones who are still aboard can last the extra week from Sipapu to Lantea on short rations, but many of the ones currently filling the gate room are children. 

Children dressed in Garanimals and Gap Kids and wearing t-shirts with Peppa Pig on them. _Earth kids_. 

They will find out in short order that Mitchell stumbled upon an Ori orphanage in Texas, that these are kids whose parents have been killed for failing to worship the Ori, that they were collected to be redistributed to faithful Ori households. This will rock Atlantis harder than the fall of Earth did, the realization that their homelands are not merely occupied but instead being remade. 

Almost everyone who came to Atlantis in peacetime is a Cold War kid from one side of the Iron Curtain or the other and the Ori 'taking' of a planet fits into that mental framework. Most of them imagined Ori-occupied Earth to be like East Germany or Czechoslovakia, an oppressive surveillance state with a mandatory belief system and a good deal of very real fear. (A few went with places like Iran or Saudi Arabia, theocracies with religious police and secret prisons nobody returned from.) But these kids are evidence of something far darker and scarier and it undoes the adults almost more than anything else. 

The kids, all under ten, are mostly unaware of the reaction they cause because they are all still living with the trauma that brought them here. Most of them saw their parents die and many of those think that they are the reason why their parents died. (They are, but not the way they think.) Having to focus on them, on their health and safety and happiness and how the heck they are going to live in a city that hasn't seen a youth population in ten thousand years is a blessing. 

Maddie Valentine, a peds resident scooped up during a hospital supply raid who is suddenly forced to abandon her 'the ink on my medical license is still drying' silent routine because she's now the sole pediatrics expert in the city, is the one to recommend that they try a version of the NICU volunteer program: getting people to hold and hug and comfort the little ones. The idea gets immediate traction and expansion because Nancy's not the only doctor here who has seen enough child war refugees on Earth to realize what kind of emotional development is getting stunted and snuffed out as these kids go through hell. 

There is no shortage of volunteers, both within Medical and from the city as a whole. There are marines and engineers and even other refugees who take turns reading stories and feeding and being nap pillows (and occasionally nap buddies). Most of the kids are from Texas, but there are at least a dozen who are Mexican and these are given over to Spanish-speaking volunteers. Staff Sergeant Ortilla, from Major Lorne's team, is there as often as he can and is a miracle worker with the kids in both languages. 

"His son's the same age as the boy in his lap," Yoni explains to Rahuli. Yoni spends a lot of time with the kids, too, which always makes his colleagues gawp despite knowing in the abstract that he is Very Good with Kids. Nancy takes a few shifts here and there, but mostly leaves it to the ones who really want to do it. 

"I don't want to confront my own choices about kids," she tells the stitch 'n bitch gals when it comes up. "Or the fact that I might not have any choices anymore." 

She doesn't not want to have kids, but she always figured there would be a point in time when she'd go from being open to the idea of it to actively wanting a baby. And between her being over thirty and currently exiled from her home galaxy in a place with limited dating options, the arc of that transformational thought process has been pretty well diverted. She doesn't think she wants a baby by herself. 

"What about Jonathan Safir?" Manika asks. 

Nancy sighs very loudly. Maybe whines.

"We don't mention the S word when she's broody about her love life," Lori says between bursts of laughter. 

"Yoni and I are friends," Nancy says slowly. "Just friends." 

"So I can ask him out?" Evie asks, all innocence on her face. "No hard feelings? You won't mind at all?" 

"Go ahead," Nancy exhorts over everyone else's noisemaking. "I'll put in a good word." 

"You'll shank me in my sleep," Evie tells her with a wink. 

"What have you been telling people?" Nancy asks Lori, exasperatedly. Lori knows that she did, in fact, kinda hint in Yoni's direction years ago and that Yoni managed to rebuff her in a way that left no awkwardness between them. It's not something the two of them have ever actually discussed at any point since and they have instead developed a friendship that she treasures (most of the time) and while the temptation is still there - he's an attractive man - she doesn't want to screw things up by screwing around. 

"None of the good stuff," Manika answers. "But we have eyes." 

"Is there good stuff?" Jen looks up from her knitting - baby booties shaped like duck feet. 

"No," Nancy replies with a frown. "He's going to go out with Evie and the marines will disown him out of shame. And then Major Lorne will get a toaster." 

He doesn't go out with Evie. He might be going out with one of the Bressian refugees who works in the daycare, but all she has to go on there is that five different people felt she ought to know that they saw him having dinner with someone in the commissary on a few late nights. She doesn't ask him about it because while he is probably a little too amused at the reputation he has in the city for being a rude asshole, he does not take being gossip fodder well. 

The cycle of heavy mission schedules for everyone capable of outside-the-city work continues, pausing to absorb the refugees and materiel from the arriving _Daedalus_ , going back to missions, and trying not to get eaten by the Wraith or shot by the Genii (or in one memorable instance for Lieutenant Osgeny, both at once). The resources that had gone toward the annual Superbowl party are now turned toward a Lunar New Year celebration that has gotten bigger every year, especially now that the Ho'atoi are essentially building an entertainment industry in the city. Evie makes everyone she knows adopt Japanese traditions in their workspaces and homes for the holidays and Nancy's origami skills are suddenly fungible. 

One of the Olerians she's now working with regularly shows up to her lab with bright blue hair and Nancy begs her for her secrets. She's had to revert back to her natural mousy brown color since the war began and she misses the person she used to be with magenta hair. Even if the marines think it's a better tactical decision to not be quite so visible from a distance and congratulated her when she had the last of the pink ends trimmed off. 

"What vat did you fall into?" Abelard asks her when she gets her hair dyed purple by the rainbow-haired lady who has set up in one of the city's new hair salons. "Are you an off-brand Violet Beauregard now?" 

The dark grape has faded into a less playful but more attractive shade of purple when they get the news that _Daedalus_ has been attacked and while it has survived, it might not make it back to Atlantis. The rescue operation takes two days, the first of which Nancy spends on board the wrecked ship patching up all of the wounded who aren't critically injured enough to merit evacuation to Atlantis - and they are setting that bar very high because it took ten jumpers to evac the urgent surgical cases. Shanahan and DiGuiseppe don't see empty tables for days, Lori spends seventeen hours putting Jonas Quinn's face back together and Chung needs about half that to reconstruct Colonel Mitchell's shoulder. Everyone else who can cut people is doing the more generalist work and the rest of the doctors, like Nancy, are supporting the nurses who are essentially carrying the rest of the load themselves. None of them see daylight for a week and they might have had the easier task compared to Engineering, charged with salvaging _Daedalus_ , whose people occasionally turn up in need of repairs themselves. 

_Daedalus_ was carrying children, as it always seems to be, and their ICU requires a PICU section and BME doing some fast inventing and construction. Yoni practically lives there because Valentine does live there and he can get yelled at by the nurses for what they don't have instead of her while Carson's running himself ragged being in six places at once. The kids aboard the ship were scooped up from Indonesia, although they are from all over Southeast Asia and there is definitely a language barrier for a few because four of the nurses speak Tagalog and there are Thai and Viet speakers in the city, but nobody has any Burmese or Laotian dialects and many of the kids are too small to have coherent language skills in any tongue. Atlantis was an international city before it became an intergalactic one so they've had pretty good luck finding translators for the kids in the past, but it's harder here and the kids' freshest trauma makes it more so. 

One of the babies in the PICU won't stop crying and is hard to soothe because she is covered in shrapnel wounds and still running an IV line so picking her up for a cuddle is a group project. Yoni looks like he's in a Twilight Zone episode when Nancy finds him stretched out in one of the chairs they've brought in, the baby curled up on his chest with all of her accoutrements and limbs carefully arranged. But the baby is sleeping and the other patients - and nurses - are more relaxed for it.

"Do you have your stethoscope?" Yoni asks quietly as he gently massages a tiny foot, the one not wrapped in bandages. "Can you take a listen?"

The baby has a heart defect, which isn't something they were looking for during the acute trauma response portion of the program. It would have been found sooner than later - most of the kids they receive are physically healthy, but some came from poverty or other less-great circumstances and they've dealt with everything from malnutrition-related disorders to a (thankfully benign) tumor. But finding the defect earlier means that it can be corrected earlier and one less colicky baby is always a good way to make nice with the nurses. 

The entire city turns out to watch the day _Daedalus_ makes it to Lantea and gets parked next to the city. It has been a month since the first mayday call and the spectators are a mix of those curious about how badly the ship was torn up (very badly) and those who already know and want to see her safe again. Nancy isn't on clinic duty today, but she helps the nurses wheel some of the semi-ambulatory injured crew to a balcony so they can watch. She came to Atlantis aboard _Daedalus_ and up until now the Wraith virus that had nearly scuttled them on that voyage had been the ship's worst day. She would have been happy for that record to have stood, not the least because that misadventure hadn't come with a body count. And because now they are truly and completely cut off from the Milky Way. 

But they are, despite everything, not faring that badly. They don't live in constant fear for their lives - most of them are sure the Ori will come eventually, but not right away and maybe even not for a long time. And all of them have already either lived through it once already or bear the lesser scars of having their lives torn apart by proxy with the fall of Earth. The worst has already happened, in other words. They have seen hell and this is not it. There is no second rash of suicides. 

Back when the databursts were still more regular than irregular and Amazon was still delivering to Pegasus whether they knew it or not, Weir had suggested an oral history project for the city: everyone do weekly five-minute conversations with a camera to document the time. Yoni and Abelard and Carson, all members of the original expedition, had made references to the video death letters they'd all composed during the Wraith siege. But they'd also all made appointments to contribute and so the rest of Medical did as well. The project got so big that now almost all of them do their additions from their laptops at home and only the refugees go over to G-2 to sit for organized interviews. 

"I know we've lowered the standards a lot," she tells her diary file a week after _Daedalus_ causes a very high tide in the city by splashing down. "But we are doing okay most days. I can make myself cry pretty easily by thinking about home, but... I went out for drinks with friends last night. I am going BASE jumping with some marines next week. I'm also going on three missions in sixteen days and have four clinic shifts on our new offworld colony and I'll be lucky if all of that goes smoothly, but... We are not trembling in fear. We are still living and not surviving and having seen so many people for whom that has not been true, I am mindful of what we have and what we can have until the Ori come and try to take it away. I think we'll be all right until then." 


End file.
